


META: What Is the Force Now?

by rexluscus



Series: Rex's Star Wars Meta [9]
Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-08
Updated: 2018-12-08
Packaged: 2019-09-14 11:46:46
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16912302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rexluscus/pseuds/rexluscus
Summary: An essay on how the Force changes throughout theStar Warsfilms.





	META: What Is the Force Now?

One of the earliest things we heard about TLJ was that Rian Johnson was going to do crazy new stuff with the Force. I’d hoped he’d get more into the dark/light duality but in the end he just expanded the stuff you can  _do_ with the Force. I get the impression that many folks find these new powers weird and universe-breaking. My jury is out, frankly, but here’s how I think the Force changes from the OT to TFA and TLJ.

(I’m not going to deal with the prequel trilogy or the extended canon because a) I’m not super familiar with them, and b) this is enough to deal with already.)

##  **The Force in the Original Trilogy**

  1. The Force is not a magical power, it’s an omnipresent principle of nature that affects everyone whether they realize it or not, but that some people are just more consciously in touch with.
  2. Which means it could theoretically do anything, so it shouldn’t have concrete “rules” the way magical systems in other fantasy stories do. It’s a higher power and a spiritual practice, not a craft.
  3. Despite its limitless potential, though, we only ever see people interact with it in a few ways.
  4. Because it’s a unifying principle to which you can become sensitive, it can bring you all sorts of information about goings-on outside yourself, including other people’s feelings and thoughts, even across distances (since it’s everywhere).
  5. This also includes information about the future, but that information is always incomplete because the Force can’t (or won’t) show you how your own choices will be implicated in that future.
  6. Whenever you  _do_ something with the Force, it’s only because the Force lets you.
  7. And yet the Force always responds to human choice - it’s an expression or metaphor for your choices and intentions, not something that determines those choices.
  8. To devote yourself to the light side of the Force is to attune yourself to the world as it is and not what you want it to be, and thus to act in harmony with everything outside yourself.
  9. That’s why it’s associated with compassion, receptivity, peaceful acceptance, and “reaching out.”
  10. To devote yourself to the dark side is to impose your will on the world and somehow to harness the Force for your own egocentric purposes
  11. That’s why it’s associated with anger, fear, selfish desire, and a will to manipulate and control. If you “reach out” with the dark side, it’s to take something.
  12. But ultimately the Force gets the last laugh, because the more you  _use_ the Force in this way, the more you channel it through your own ego and desires, the more you cut yourself off from other lives and the more spiritually and physically impoverished you become.
  13. The dark side corrupts you as you become addicted to its power, but the light side never ceases to be present, because ultimately both sides are just natural laws - of creation and destruction, maybe, or of nature and self.
  14. (I’m not sure how this light/dark distinction would account for the Jedi Mind Trick, but you could argue that your intentions matter - whether you’re doing it in the service of yourself or others. I dunno.)



##  **The Force in _The Force Awakens_**

TFA doesn’t exactly contradictany of this, I don’t think, but it dramatically reimagines it, following on the fact that the characters are in fundamentally different situations. Here are the differences I see:

  1. The Force has a lot more agency in TFA. “The will of the Force” becomes an actual player in the narrative. It “awakens.” It leads Rey to Anakin’s lightsaber and spontaneously shows her a vision. (This is necessary, of course, because she doesn’t have Obi-Wan to show her how to access the Force.)
  2. Because it’s basically a character now, the Force seems to have a new interest in the past. For instance, historical objects can now be imbued with its power - the lightsaber “calls” to Rey, and the vision the Force shows her is a patchwork of the lightsaber’s history. We never saw anything like that in the OT.
  3. Relatedly, the Force now has its own clear ideas about personal destinies. Characters seem to have  _fates_ , particularly Rey, for whom the Force isn’tjust a psychological metaphor for her fraught relationship with her dad but something that comes out of nowhere and seizesher. (The OT was actually kinda  _anti-_ destiny - it was only ever Vader who insisted on determinism.)
  4. TFA gives the Force itself its own sound and visual imagery. Obviously the OT hammers you with dark side/light side imagery in the character designs, but it’s all basically psychological symbolism. In TFA, we  _see_ and  _hear_ the Force itself in a way we haven’t before. The dark and light sides get more visually reified, too - for instance, when the sun disappears and Kylo kills Han, as well as the pervasive red/blue contrast that of course  _comes_ from the OT but now defines the whole color scheme of the film.
  5. Another case in point: Finn. We don’t see him  _use_ the Force, but the photography and sound design in his first scene make it clear that the Force is materially affecting his choices. In the OT, you could interpret Han as doing the same thing, but the films never directly imply this by, say, giving us a significant sound effect when he decides to do the selfless thing. (We do see the brilliant sun behind the Millennium Falcon as he swoops in to protect Luke, but that’s symbolic, not a literal attempt to  _depict_ the Force in action.) So TFA makes it explicit that Finn, who might not “have the Force” the same way Rey does, still follows the will of the Force by listening to his conscience. This is cuz they’re trying to make it clear that the Force doesn’t  _just_ play a role in the lives of a few chosen ones, which the OT implies _-_ like when Obi-Wan tells Han “in my experience there’s no such thing as luck” - but never states outright.
  6. The weirdest example of this new way of representing the Force is Rey resisting Kylo’s mind-probe. Obviously we’ve seen  _fights_ between dark- and light-side users (although it’s premature to call Rey a “light-side user” at this point) but never as this direct quasi-physical contact between two people’s Force powers. The Force has only ever been an instrument in an otherwise mundane battle. In this scene, it seem to have a weight and substanceit never had before.
  7. They’re also trying to do something new with dark side vs. light side as an internal  _ethical_ conflict (as opposed to a spiritual or psychological one). Rey and Kylo obviously carry the banners of the light and dark sides (something TLJ gives a literal explanation for) but there’s this new effort to scramble our sense of when a character is dominated by one or the other. Rey is a well-intentioned and compassionate person, but she learns how to usethe Force from Kylo, and she beats him by using his own tools against him. She’s never even heard of this light side/dark side shit - it’s just “the Force” for her, and she uses it to defend herself and her friends in whatever way it comes to hand. Also, her big turning point happens when she connects something Maz said with something Kylo says - just that word, “Force.”
  8. Similarly, we’ve never seen anyone  _work hard_  to commit themselves to the dark side like Kylo does. Does that make sense at all? Here’s what I think is going on: in ROTJ, we learn that Yoda and Obi-Wan  _believe_  that a fall to the dark side can’t be reversed, that it’s a true metaphysical corruption - and clearly, Vader believes that too. You could argue that the  _belief,_ and not the reality, is what keeps Vader from wavering until the very end, when Luke’s faith in him and his love for Luke transform him like a religious conversion. Before that, he simply doesn’t believe that any flickerings of light in himself could be real, and only Luke’s faith convinces him otherwise. Kylo simply doesn’t have that same belief Vader has. It’s not the dogma he was taught, either by Luke orby Snoke. The whole idea of “converting” from the light side to the dark or vice versa is gone, and all you can do is just continuously choose one over the other. So, conflicts that the OT represented archetypally, for instance by making Vader represent Luke’s “dark side” with whom he must reconcile to become a whole person, now become more about ethics and personal responsibility.
  9. Which is why it perplexes me a little that, as they make the dark and light sides less psychological and more ethical, they’d also choose to give the Force itself this new autonomous presence. TFA takes the Force and goes both inward and outward with it in a new way. But I think I have an explanation for that, which I’ll get to at the end.



##  **The Force in _The Last Jedi_**

  1. So, the obvious question: is the shit people do with the Force in TLJ consistent with its “rules” thus far? Let’s go one by one:
  2. Rey and Kylo seeing each other’s futures chimes with what we know about Force prophecies from the OT. The future is always in flux, always just images and feelings, so Force visions of the future never give you any knowledge you can act on with certainty. Kylo and Rey just see what they each want to see.
  3. How about Kylo fooling Snoke? That seemed overly clever and complicated to me, but if the Force primarily allows you to sense feelings and not thoughts, as it mostly does in the OT, then it basically works and doesn’t break anything.
  4. Now onto a big thing: Kylo and Rey connecting through the Force. The Force connection is weird: it’s way more literal than Luke calling to Leia or Vader calling to Luke in ESB, which are really just “calls,” not a whole conversation. It really is like Rey and Kylo are Skyping: they can see and hear each other, but they can’t sense each other inwardly. And of course we’ve never seen that kind of contact turn into actual physical presence, as it does when they touch hands. That’s ambiguous, of course - maybe they just  _think_ they’re touching. But the larger point is: the Force seems to be facilitating not direct psychic contact but external communication. In other words, Rey and Kylo can’t just instantly touch minds, they have to  _talk_ \- which is not heretofore what the Force does. The Force is a form of intuition, usually. 
  5. There are two possible reasons the Force might behave this way. The first, more obvious one would be that Snoke created the connection. He’s evil, so of course it’s not going work like the light-side-motivated contact between characters in the OT. I feel like the filmmakers kinda gave themselves an out with this explanation, though, because there’s another, more interesting possible reason: 
  6. The thing is, Rey and Kylo don’t have any natural pre-existing connection. All that brings them together is that they seem to have been “chosen” by the Force for some larger purpose. So the Force has to  _build_ their connection instead of flowing along an existing one. Again, we didn’t know the Force could do this, but it’s consistent with TFA giving the Force this new ability to manipulate the narrative, and with TFA’s choice to push these two Force-using characters together who are basically total strangers. The sequel trilogy isn’t doing the psychological family archetype thing that the OT did. So my verdict is, Force-Skyping doesn’t break the universe because it happens under fundamentally different conditions than what we’ve seen before. But of course because of that, it has a very different vibe than anything we saw in the OT and might reasonably rub us the wrong way.
  7. Now we get to Luke astrally projecting himself from Ahch-To to Crait. As with Rey and Kylo’s connection, the Force does something more literal, more physically manifest, more  _complicated_ and less elegant, you could say, than it ever does in the OT. We’re getting less spiritual and more magical. And again, the Force isn’t a conduit for intuition but for external appearance, even illusion _._ In the OT, the Force pretty much always does what it seems to be doing - it deceives neither the characters nor the viewers. In TLJ, Luke does an actual miracle that is also a trick. It’s not the miracle (let’s face it, the Force can probably do anything) but the trick that feels off. Leia at least seems aware that he’s not  _really_ there, but they each pretend he is to console each other and say goodbye. Kylo and everyone else, however, fall for the trick. Luke uses the Force to manipulate Kylo, taunting him with the final showdown he craves and then taking it away while also distracting him long enough for the Resistance to escape. And he tricks us too - until the last moment (unless we were paying attention to a few visual clues),  _we_  suspecthe’s going to do the Obi-Wan thing and let Kylo strike him down so he can become more powerful than Kylo could possibly imagine. That’s fundamentally something the OT never does.
  8. So: is any of this world-breaking? Maybe, but there seems to be a storytelling reason for it. Luke’s astral projection  _and_ the Force connection are both about illusions taking the place of intuitive knowledge. And the difference between those two things is that illusions have to be interpreted _._ You can’t just  _know_ what they mean. They aren’t lies _,_ necessarily, they’re just opaque. And you could argue that the Force works this way now because there’s a fundamental gulf of strangeness between the characters (and between them and their pasts) that never existed in the OT. The larger story is about being cut off from history, from family, from any kind of continuity (which of course makes you compulsively  _repeat_ the past because you can’t learn from it). And the big metaphor for this forgotten history is that the Force went to sleep for a while. Now it has a different job - to connect people who have no pre-existing basis for connection, or who have actively destroyed all their connections. People in this world don’t  _know_ the Force the way they used to, and so it comes in like a stranger, like a scary divine manifestation you can’t yet understand.



In conclusion: the Force in the sequel trilogy isn’t really psychological or spiritual at all - it’s not a force of  _nature_ but of  _history,_ of society _._ Which is…sad, in a way. Maybe we’d hoped Star Wars would give us a respite from history. But the Force is a pretty adaptable metaphor. The essential thing about it is that it’s not a thing you  _use,_ but an entity beyond yourself that you can either listen to or twist to your purposes at your peril. So it can easily be both nature and history, I’d say.

**Author's Note:**

> This meta was originally posted on Tumblr, but I'm posting it here to make sure it's preserved.


End file.
